The number of commercial pornography web pages on the Internet has increased by nearly 1,800 percent compared with five years ago, according to Internet filtering company N2H2 (OTC Bulletin Board: NTWO.OB). In the month of July alone, N2H2 identified web sites comprising over 28 million pages for its filtering database, and N2H2 now has identified over 260 million pages classified as pornography. The pervasiveness of Internet pornography highlights the continued need for effective solutions to prevent liability issues in the workplace, government agencies and schools.

N2H2’s database contained 14 million identified pages of pornography in 1998, so the growth to 260 million represents an almost 20-fold increase in just five years. Statistics derived from the search engine Google support the notion that pornography is pervasive on the Internet. For example, a search in Google on the word “porn” returned over 80 million pages, and “xxx” returned more than 76 million.

The growth in the number of pornographic web pages is driven by the economics of Internet pornography, as the National Research Council (NRC) found in the landmark study entitled Youth, Pornography and the Internet. The NRC report concluded, “The revenue models of the adult online industry suggest that broad exposure is needed to attract potential customers, and so the industry engages in tactics that seek to generate the broadest possible audience.”

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation documented that large numbers of minors are exposed to the sea of pornography. The Kaiser study found that among teens online, 70 percent have accidentally come across pornography on the Web. Many of these minors may stumble onto these sites through “porn-napped” and “typosquatted” websites. Porn-napped sites are expired domain names of innocent sites that are taken over by pornographers. Typosquat websites are those where an unscrupulous pornographer has deliberately registered names with typos to drive unwilling customers to pornography sites. The Department of Justice recently launched the first prosecution of a typosquatter for registering the names Teltubbies.com and Bobthebiulder.com to pornography sites.

“Pornography is becoming so prevalent on the Internet that it is now difficult to avoid unwanted exposure, and this makes cybersex addiction more likely, which can lead to a multitude of legal issues for organizations,” said Dr. Kimberly S. Young, executive director of the Center for On-Line Addiction and author of the new book, Tangled in the WEB: Understanding Cybersex from Fantasy to Addiction. “There is a definite need for tools like filtering software to offer protection for those who want, or are required, to avoid this type of illicit material.”

Fortunately, solutions for corporate enterprise, government agencies and schools are available. N2H2’s Sentian and Bess Internet filtering software is backed by a highly accurate database that has been rated industry-best at blocking pornography by two independent studies. There have been recent filtering software studies by eTesting Labs for the Department of Justice and a peer-reviewed study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Both found N2H2 superior to competitors at blocking pornographic Internet content without unduly blocking appropriate content, even in related areas such as breast cancer or sexually transmitted diseases.